"INSANE VICE"

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23931, 5 October 1939, Page 7

"INSANE VICE"

BIRTH RESTRICTION AND MENTAL DEFICIENCY NEW ZEALAND'S HIGH PERCENTAGE (From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, Sept 6. The Rev. Father C. C. Martindale has an article in The Catholic Herald, on "Writers, Critics and the Press." His remarks on the press are inspired by Mr Wickham Steed's book, which displayed how easy it was for a paper to be influenced, if not blackmailed, by advertisers, and, again, how writers have to obey the orders of the proprietors. "A newspaper," says Father Martindale, "must be free to express its own views, even should these clash with those of its readers, and no reader would object so long as it is clearly in search of facts, however unpopular. Let me draw to myself the thunder by one example. " When I first visited New Zealand, I fell so completely in love with it that I was the more appalled by the prevalence of artificial birth restriction there, and disgusted by the antiquated arguments used on its behalf, and I said so, and was violently reproached for this. On my second visit, when I had learnt more, I said the same thing louder. " Recently, a layman (who certainly knows most of the world) has written to us that he was horrified at the prevalence of this insane vice in New Zealand; that those islands had the highest percentage of illegitimacy (in view of what preceded this seems odd), and mental deficiency in the world; and that no Government could survive there or in Australia which tried to interfere with that racket. Whether he was right I can't tell—l mean as to percentages; here facts —even more facts—need to be collected and exhibited. "My impression v/as that New Zealanders and Australians are among the world's most lovable men; that they have been for long subjected to an education lacking in much that is positively formative and necessary; that they possess hardly any of those intermediate' magazines which can put forward serious arguments, and that being so, they are often very out of date as to even moderate opinion, and at the mercy of the unscrupulous moneymaker, and, in New Zealand, I was told this with such emphasis and so often that I had to argue against it, and say that they were less ' over the world's edge' than they thought. "Under all New Zealand's major problems—military (questions of defence), educational, financial, and even that of the nature of its future race or indeed survival, lies that of the mental and mora] structure."